A fraudster who tricked luxury hotels and stores into buying "Scottish-grown tea" that was grown abroad has been found guilty of a £550,000 scam.
Where did he say the plantations were, right next to the haggis ranches?
Thomas Robinson supplied high-end customers such as Edinburgh's Balmoral Hotel and the Dorchester in London with varieties with names like Dalreoch White, Highland Green, Silver Needles and Scottish Antlers Tea. Trading as The Wee Tea Plantation, he claimed they had been grown on farmland in Perthshire.
What sort of buyers are these places employing? Perhaps they'd all visited the Eden Project, where you can indeed be served locally grown tea, but even a child can understand there's a vast difference in climate between Cornwall and Scotland.
Instead, the tea had been imported, repackaged and then resold at hugely-inflated prices, Falkirk Sheriff Court was told. Robinson also defrauded genuine aspiring Scottish tea growers by selling them plants he claimed were grown in Scotland.
Mad dreamers are so susceptible to conmen...
The 55-year-old, who is also known as Thomas O'Brien or Tam O' Braan, rented a former sheep farm near Loch Tay and began spinning "elaborate lies" to customers. Prosecutors said he created the "CV of a fantasist" (Ed: Good thing for Rachel Reeves that isn't illrgal in and of itself)- claiming among other things that he was a multi-millionaire, a polymer scientist, a former bomb disposal expert and had invented the "bag for life".
He also claimed to have developed a "special biodegradable polymer" that would make the tea plants grow in half the usual time. The court was told it looked like a black bin liner.
Because it's probably exactly what it was....
The scam began to unravel in 2017 after Perth and Kinross Council started to check if he had a food processing licence.
Took them long enough!
After a three-week trial jurors took six hours to find him guilty of defrauding tea growers, hotels and tea companies of nearly £553,000 in total. He will be sentenced at a later date, and also faces proceedings under the Proceeds of Crime Act.
They should serve him his own tea when he's doing porridge!
Darjeeling porridge I hope.
ReplyDeletePerhaps it was because the tea leaves were painted blue, with white crosses, that gave it away.
ReplyDeletePenseivat
Good for him. He will write a best seller. Be paid for a blockbuster movie.
ReplyDeleteWho does not love a rogue who took the rich posers for a ride.
Del Boy, The Pink Panther, Louis D' Ascoyne Mazzini, Max Bialystock.
If you're going to lie, you mights as well make it a big one that'll give the rest of us a laugh. I also hope this story enters the common lexicon; just this morning I read a story where the journalist used the phrase "if you believe that I've got a bridge to sell you", and I can see "Scottish tea-leaves" joining it as a reference to gullibility.
ReplyDelete